Ep 43: CEO/Co-Founder of Contextual AI Douwe Kiela Reaction to o1, What’s Next in Reasoning and Innovations in Post-Training

Douwe’s contributions to AI are truly a part of its bedrock foundations. He wrote the first paper on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and has raised over $100 million to help enterprises build contextual language models that fit their use cases. Before Contextual he was the head of research at Hugging Face, worked on the Facebook AI research team (i.e. Llama) and remains a professor at Stanford. Douwe was incredibly open about his take on AI’s recent history and where he thinks it’s going.

[0:00] Intro
[0:51] Exploring the Impact of Systems Thinking in AI
[1:49] Latency Constraints and AI Deployments
[2:05] Benchmarks and Real-World Applications
[3:27] Transition to Contextual and Company Vision
[5:12] Challenges and Innovations in Enterprise AI
[8:51] The Evolution and Future of RAG
[15:26] Alignment and Reinforcement Learning in AI
[23:52] Collaborations and the Role of Academia
[29:15] The Evolving Role of AI Developers
[30:19] Changing Perspectives in AI Research
[30:44] Synthetic Data and Agentic Workflows
[33:47] The Future of Multimodal Data
[35:31] Reasoning Capabilities in AI Models
[42:56] The Rise of Multi-Agent Systems
[45:24] Hugging Face and the AI Ecosystem
[46:59] Building Contextual and AI Startups
[49:51] The Future of AI and Personalized Entertainment
[50:41] Quickfire Round: Overhyped and Underhyped AI
[56:25] Final Thoughts and Parting Words

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint